Court Case Against Anglophone Church Leaders to Proceed in Spite of
Presidential Amnesty

After the release of the 55 Anglophone Cameroonians detained in connection with the Anglophone crisis, many Anglophone Cameroonians were hop...

After the release of the 55 Anglophone Cameroonians detained in connection with the Anglophone crisis, many Anglophone Cameroonians were hoping that another decree will be passed announcing the release of the other Anglophone Cameroonians still in detention and the case against the clergy men dropped.

However Kinnaka,s Blog just confirmed through multiple reliable sources that the Court proceedings against the Anglophone church leaders will still continue in spite of President Paul Biya’s decision to free fifty-five of the 100 hundred Anglophones detained.

According to information we got from the Post newspaper, Barrister Julius Tabe Ngu (the lead counsel of the Consortium of Parents that is prosecuting the church leaders), has made it clear that the case against the clergymen has nothing to do with the government or president Biya and therefore the government of Cameroon has no power over the matter but Consortium of parents that took the Clergy men to court.

Barrister Julius Tabe Ngu further said that “The first reason why the church leaders were taken to court is because they refused to re-open their schools after the suspension of the teachers’ strike”. “The church leaders a couple of weeks ago accepted to re-open their schools and announcements were made to that effect. That is good, but we are going to see whether the church leaders are going to match words with action” he added. He was speaking in Douala September 2, just 48 hours after the Presidential ‘pardon’, releasing Anglophone activists on August 30.

The Consortium of Parents is believed by many to be a masquerade in the hands of some pro-government individuals. However, Tabe Ngu refutes that accusation. “The government is not the complainant in the case against the church leaders. Our case is a private matter.

It should be noted that the Bishops of the Catholic Church, the Executive President of the CBC and the Moderator of the PCC were all accused on seven counts by the Consortium of Parents for “refusing to ask parents to send their children to school, refusing to pay teachers, refusing to teach students and spreading false information”.

The accusations followed a February 9 communique in which the church leaders had jointly called on the government to pursue frank dialogue with the agitating Anglophone leaders and in which the churches had pointed out that the problem currently rocking the Northwest and Southwest Regions of Cameroon “are as a result of an underlying and unsolved political problem”.

We are expecting the case to come up simultaneously in all five courts on the 25th of September, 2017. Should the case go through and Tabe Ngu’s clients win, the three mainline churches would be expected to pay the sum of FCFA 150 Billion to the “Consortium of parents” for damages.